Trouble with NTBackup

[Jason Bourg]

I have a colleague in my office that is having trouble with her
nightly backup and is looking to me for help. She is running
WindowsXP Pro. Originally, when I first looked at the machine,
NTBackup appeared to be hanging up every night. I tried a manual
backup one evening, and it was hanging while "Preparing..." something.
I found articles that stated that this could be caused by the Volume
Shadow Copy service. I checked and it was started, but on manual
startup. I'm not sure how it got started, as she wouldn't have done
that. I changed the service so that it was stopped and disabled.
Now, the back up fails immediately, adding a line to the report
stating "Error returned while creating the volume shadow
copy:Catastrophic failure". I've tried to go in and check the box
that says "Disable Volume Shadow Copy", but the box is disabled. I've
gone back to my machine (also Windows XP Pro), and the box is also
disabled, the VSS service is stopped/manual, and everything is
perfectly happy on my machine. She also gets two errors in the
application log:

Volume Shadow Copy Service error: Unexpected error calling routine
CoCreateInstance. hr = 0x80070422.

Volume Shadow Copy Service error: Shadow Copy shim called routine
CoCreateInstance( CLSID_VSSCoordinator, IID_IVssShim) which failed
with status 0x80070422 (converted to 0x8000ffff).

I can't find anything right on point, so I thought it was time to ask.
Any ideas?

 

[Guest]

0x80070422 means that the VSS service is disabled. You shouldn't disable it.
It must be enough just to check the "Disable Volume Shadow Copy" box.

If this does not help, there may be a lot of reasons of the backup hanging
up - corrupted hard disk, spyware, no service packs installed and so on.

What's the backup destination - a tape drive or file?

 

[S.Sengupta]

0x80070422 means ERROR_SERVICE_DISABLED. It seems the Volume
Shadow Copy service is disabled on your machine. This might explain
why you get these shadow copy failures in NTBackup - so it is not
necesarily to turn them off.

Please make sure that the following services are enabled on your
machine:
- Volume Shadow Copy (VSS)
- Microsoft Software Shadow Copy Provider (SWPRV)
- Remote Procedure Call (RPCSS) - should be enabled as "Automatic"
- COM+ Event System (eventsystem)
- System Event Notification Service (sens) - should be enabled as
"Automatic"

regards,
ssg MS-MVP

 

[Matt James]

Still me, just using my own computer this time...

I've enabled the VSS service, and the backup doesn't crash right away.
However, it does hang while "Preparing to backup using shadow
copy..." It's been doing that for at least 10 minutes now, and will
probably continue all night if I were to let it. What else do I need
to do here?

As for 'nospam's questions,
- The Disable Volume Shadow Copy is grayed out and unavailable.
- I am backing up to a network drive on a server in the office.

Again, I am trying to back up the C drive and system state to another
machine. This is the same setup as my own machine, but my machine
backs up fine and my colleague continues to have problems. Both
machines also have service pack 2 installed.

If anyone has any suggestions, I'd appreciate them.

Thanks,
Matt

 

[Guest]

Matt, did you ever get this resolved? Before seeing your note, I posted the
same problem whereby the "Preparing ...shadow copy" stalls out , NTBackup
hangs and I have to manually power down the system. I thought it might be
related to the RAID 1 HDs I have installed on my Dell 8400 XPS. I too have a
similarily configured Dell 8250 for which the backup utility works just fine.
Perhaps my advanced backup options are set differently, but both run XP Pro
SP2.